The Phonology of Chichewa

The Phonology of Chichewa

Author: Laura J. Downing

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017-06-02

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 0191037737

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This book provides thorough descriptive and theory-neutral coverage of the full range of phonological phenomena of Chichewa, a Malawian Bantu language. Bantu languages have played and continue to play an important role as a source of data illustrating core phonological processes such as vowel harmony, nasal place assimilation, postnasal laryngeal alternations, tonal phenomena such as High tone spread and the OCP, prosodic morphology, and the phonology-syntax interface. Chichewa, in particular, has been a key language in the development of theoretical approaches to these phenomena. In this volume, Laura Downing and Al Mtenje examine not only these well-known features of Chichewa but also less well-studied phonological topics such as positional asymmetries in the distribution of segments, the phonetics of tone, and intonation. They survey important recent theoretical approaches to phonological problems such as focus prosody, reduplication, and vowel harmony, where Chichewa data is routinely referred to in the literature. The book will serve as a resource for all phonologists interested in these processes, regardless of their theoretical background, as well as Bantu scholars and linguists working on interface issues.


The Phonology-Syntax Connection

The Phonology-Syntax Connection

Author: Sharon Inkelas

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 1990-05-08

Total Pages: 452

ISBN-13: 9780226381015

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This collection of papers deals with the inter relatedness of syntax and phonology and, more generally, with the issue of interaction among the components of linguistic structure.


The Phonology of Chichewa

The Phonology of Chichewa

Author: Laura J. Downing

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 311

ISBN-13: 0198724748

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This book provides thorough descriptive and atheoretical coverage of the full range of phonological phenomena of Chichewa, a Malawian Bantu language. It covers topics such as vowel harmony, nasal place assimilation, postnasal laryngeal alternations, tonal phenomena, prosodic morphology, and the phonology-syntax interface.


Topic and Focus

Topic and Focus

Author: Chungmin Lee

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2006-12-18

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 1402047967

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During the 2001 Linguistic Summer Institute at University of California, Santa Barbara, a group of linguists gathered at a workshop to discuss the expression and role of topicalization and focus from a variety of perspectives: phonetic, phonological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic. The workshop was designed to lay the groundwork for collaborative efforts between linguists devoted to the study of meaning and linguists engaged in the quantitative study of intonation. This volume contains papers emerging from the Santa Barbara Workshop on Topic and Focus. A wide variety of methodologies and research interests related to topic and focus are represented in the papers. Some works present results of phonetic studies, either acoustic or perceptual, on the expression of topic and/or focus; others examine semantic or pragmatic features of topic and/or focus, while others are concerned with the interface between intonation and meaning. Data from several different languages are represented in the papers, including several languages with relatively little documentation particularly in the venue of topic and focus, e. g. Basque, Chickasaw, Indonesian, Polish, Taiwanese. The broad sample of languages coupled with the wide variety of research topics addressed by the papers promise to enrich our typological understanding of topic and focus phenomena and provide an impetus for further research. The following paragraphs offer brief summaries of the papers contained in this volume: Gorka Elordieta’s paper describes prosodic conditions governing focus in a dialect of Basque with pitch accents.


Intonation in African Tone Languages

Intonation in African Tone Languages

Author: Laura J. Downing

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2016-11-07

Total Pages: 448

ISBN-13: 3110503522

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This volume brings together two under-investigated areas of intonation typology. While tone languages make up to 70 percent of the world’s languages, only few have been explored for intonation. And even though one third of the world’s languages are spoken in Africa, and most sub-Saharan languages are tone languages, recent collections on tone and intonation typology have almost entirely ignored African languages. This book aims to fill this gap.


Optimality Theory in Phonology

Optimality Theory in Phonology

Author: John J. McCarthy

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2008-04-15

Total Pages: 624

ISBN-13: 0470755520

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Optimality Theory in Phonology: A Reader is a collection of readings on this important new theory by leading figures in the field, including a lengthy excerpt from Prince and Smolensky’s never-before-published Optimality Theory: Constraint Interaction in Generative Grammar. Compiles the most important readings about Optimality Theory in phonology from some of the most prominent researchers in the field. Contains 33 excerpts spanning a range of topics in phonology and including many never-before-published papers. Includes a lengthy excerpt from Prince and Smolensky’s foundational 1993 manuscript Optimality Theory: Constraint Interaction in Generative Grammar. Includes introductory notes and study/research questions for each chapter.


The Limits of Syntax

The Limits of Syntax

Author: Peter Culicover

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2020-01-13

Total Pages: 415

ISBN-13: 9004373160

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The Limits of Syntax is a collection of original, never before published essays. Each essay explores the ways in which greater incorporation of nonsyntactic explanations into linguistic research may deepen our understanding of problematic linguistic phenomena and, at the same time, strengthen syntactic research. To clarify the limits of syntactic explanation, these essayists investigate four areas. The first is a set of general issues related to the theory of grammar and the place of syntax in it. The second set develops an explanation of the power of semantics pragmatics within a syntactic theory. The third addresses the status of syntactic constraints, and the fourth seeks to explain the triggering of movement in the so-called Minimalist Program and its derivational approach to syntactic representations. It seeks to refine the theory of syntax and encourages more adequate characterization of linguistic phenomena. The original papers form a coherent presentation.


Syntax-Phonology Interface

Syntax-Phonology Interface

Author: Hongming Zhang

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2016-11-25

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 1351776207

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This book centers on theoretical issues of phonology-syntax interface based on tone sandhi in Chinese dialects. It uses patterns in tone sandhi to study how speech should be divided into domains of various sizes or levels. Tone sandhi refers to tonal changes that occur to a sequence of adjacent syllables or words. The size of this sequence (or the domain) is determined by various factors, in particular the syntactic structure of the words and the original tones of the words. Chinese dialects offer a rich body of data on tone sandhi, and hence great evidence for examining the phonology-syntax interface, and for examining the resulting levels of domains (the prosodic hierarchy). Syntax-Phonology Interface: Argumentation from Tone Sandhi in Chinese Dialects is an extremely valuable text for graduate students and scholars in the fields of linguistics and Chinese.


Prosodic Categories: Production, Perception and Comprehension

Prosodic Categories: Production, Perception and Comprehension

Author: Sónia Frota

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2011-01-04

Total Pages: 299

ISBN-13: 9400701373

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Located at the intersection of phonology, psycholinguistics and phonetics, this volume offers the latest research findings in key areas of prosodic theory, including: •The relationship between intonation and pragmatics in speech production •Sentence modality prosody characterization •The role of pitch in quantity-based sound systems •Consonant-conditioned tone depression phonology across languages •The encoding of intonational contrasts in both intonational and tonal languages Featuring new data and ground-breaking results, the papers draw on empirical approaches that analyze production, perception and comprehension experiments such as the prepared speech paradigm and semantic scaling tasks. These are discussed in a variety of languages, some underrepresented in the literature (such as French and Estonian) while others, such as Shekgalagari, are examined in this way for the first time. This collection of cutting-edge material will be of interest to a broad range of language researchers.